Kanya started TIDAL with Jay Z and others, but with a monthly price of US$20, the service aimed at giving artists a fairer share of streaming revenue received criticism from singer Marina and the Diamonds for not being financially “accessible to all music lovers”.

An estimated 848 petabytes (858 billion gigabytes) of files were shared via peer-to-peer networks in the US last year, so Kanye would have a lot of company if he was, indeed, file sharing.